So You Think You Have an Eighth Grade Education?

Forrest M. Mims III

Over Christmas I was working on an essay about the science short course that I teach once or twice a year for the University of the Nations in Hawaii or Switzerland. Students from a few dozen countries on six continents have taken this course since 1993, and it's provided interesting insight into educational achievement around the world.

Because I am an American, it is embarrassing to have to face the issue of declining educational standards in the United States. The details about dismal test scores and lowered standards have been discussed in many studies, articles and books, some of which can be easily found in a quick search of the web. So rather than discussing the details of the problem here, let us return to an earlier era to find out what was expected of students more than a century ago.

I first found the famous exam supposedly given to eight-grade students in Kansas who wished to advance to high school. This exam is widely available on the web and has also been the subject of various newspaper articles. But is it real? According to TruthOrFiction.com, the exam is real, but the claim it was intended for eighth graders is "Fiction!"

The exam questions are certainly much too advanced for today's eighth graders, at least in the United States. Because the exam does not explicitly state it is for eighth graders, TruthOrFiction.com speculates that it might be intended for teachers instead of students. But I once saw a century old teacher's exam in the stacks at Texas State University, and it was much more difficult than the Kansas exam. Therefore, I challenged TruthOrFiction.com to justify their "Fiction!" claim. I also advised TruthOrFiction.com about an archived 1890 exam that explicitly claims to be for eighth graders and features questions at least as difficult as those on the 1895 exam.

Comparing these two exams may explain why TruthOrFiction.com had second thoughts about their "Fiction!" claim when I referred them to the 1890 exam. They now label the 1895 exam as "Unproven!" Is it possible that the 1895 exam that TruthOrFiction.com suggested was for teachers instead of eighth graders was well above what the site's operators--and the rest of us--learned in eighth grade? You can decide for yourself by taking both exams.

The 1890 exam was a high school entrance exam intended for eighth grade students who had reached the age of 12 years. The exam is part of a collection of documents entitled "Programme of Study for Public Schools in British Columbia, 1890." These and many other documents have been archived at The Homeroom, a remarkable web site about the history of schools in British Columbia, Canada, edited by Dr. Patrick A. Dunae and hosted by Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

The 1890 exam is published on one web page by the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society. According to the Society's web site, the exam, "was transcribed from the original document in the collection of the Smoky Valley Genealogy Society, Salina, Kansas. This test is the original eighth-grade final exam for 1895 from Salina, KS. An interesting note is the fact that the county students taking this test were allowed to take the test in the 7th grade, and if they did not pass the test at that time, they were allowed to re-take it again in the 8th grade."

The 1895 Kansas exam is here. The 1890 British Columbia exam can be found by starting here.

You will note that some of the questions are no longer applicable in today's culture. As for the Kansas exam's note that, "Penmanship of Applicants will be graded from the manuscripts." Cursive writing is no longer taught in many schools across the United States.

I'll have more to say about the decline of educational standards in a future editorial. Meanwhile, if you manage to survive either or both exams, please report back with your observations and suggestions. Send your comments to "Backscatter" and place "Exam" in the subject line to give us permission to publish your reply.